‘The Terminal’: Limbo I Can Relate To

Photo by Matt Biddulph via Flickr (Creative Commons)

This weekend, on a long distance bus ride, I found myself watching The Terminal. (You know, the one where Tom Hanks lives in JFK for a year and makes out with Catherine Zeta-Jones?) Under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have found it sweet, if fairly forgettable—but on the bus, with snowy, nondescript Western New York sliding by, I was surprised by the way the film’s themes, about waiting and limbo, grabbed me. Airport terminals have a static in-between-ness all their own, but long bus and train rides—despite, obviously, keeping travelers in motion—can have that same quality of suspended animation, too. Being in a strange place, surrounded by strange people, dozing and eating in semi-public, I felt much less like someone watching Hanks’ character from the outside, and more like a colleague—or, well, like a fellow-traveler.

It’s not often that I watch travel movies while I am actually traveling, and “The Terminal” made me wonder whether I’d see many of them differently if I made a habit of matching them with transit. What would I think of “Lost in Translation” if I watched it in a Tokyo hotel? Or if I watched “Roman Holiday” in Rome? I knew a girl, years ago, who swore she’d watched Alive on a flight to Ireland; I always doubted the story, but then again, I saw White Squall while attending summer camp on a tall ship. (And yup, that’s the one about a tall ship adventure gone horrifically wrong.) So I guess anything’s possible.

Have you ever paired travel with a matching travel movie?

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